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Download Issue IMPRIMIS Because Ideas Have Consequences Hillsdale College Hillsdale, Michigan 49242 Volume 15, No. 3 March, 1986 POPULAR CULTURE AND THE "SUICIDE OF THE WEST" by Joseph Sobran Editor's Preview: This address is the last in a series reprinted from the Shavano Institute's conference, "Moral Equivalence: False Images of U.S. and Soviet Values," held in Washington, D.C. in May of 1985. One of theJorty-five participants, Joseph Sobran, _presents his charge that fascism, not "moral equivalence" is the straw man that popular culture has attacked for over a decade. Mr. Sobran notes that although public sentiment is critical of communism and refutes any alleged equiva­ lence between democratic and communist systems, movie­ makers and other purveyors of popular culture seldom yield to this, preferring to deplore Nazism and "its heirs in the West." For these individuals and for the liberal community, it is "safe" to deplore Hitler because it helps them to evade condemning communism, acknowledging its victims, and facing its full horror. Yet, says Mr. Sobran, communism has murdered several times as many people as Nazism. Ironically, Americans are more shocked by the excesses of Joseph McCarthy than Josef Stalin, and it is our popular culture which seeks to convince us that we would be hypocritical Cold War mentality. Most Hollywood movies with politi­ if we felt any other way. cal or heavy social themes have a left-wing slant. This is true even though the great majority of such movies have A few weeks ago I saw The Killing Fields-the first been box office flops, while the right-wing themes of movie in memory to depict communist atrocities. As you Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson movies have been probably know, it's about Cambodia after the Khmer tremendous successes. Rouge victory. It shows re-education camps, mass Long after our boys in Europe were-demobilize , murders, piles of corpses-characteristic horrors of com­ Hollywood was still fighting fascism. This catch-all munism. Only one thing is missing: the word "commu­ category includes anything opposed to the Left. Some­ nism." The movie studiously avoids it. It seems to blame times the fascist role is played by the CIA, as in Three all this killing on little Asiatic fanatics, with no hint that Days of the Condor. Sometimes it's the House on Un­ their leaders were acting out the classic pattern of an American Activities Committee, as in The Front. It can ideology they had picked up in the West, in Paris, to be be the military, as in Apocalypse Now. It can be a right­ precise. wing government abroad, as in Missing, or the nuclear You can see almost anything in movies these days. The power industry, as in The China Syndrome. Richard law even tolerates hard-core porn. But there seems to be Nixon has been used as a looming quasi-fascist figure in an unwritten law against hard-core anti-communism. the background of a number of movies. The Killing Sometimes I wonder if there's some sort of ideological Fields tries to blame the fate of Cambodia at least part­ Hays Office operating in Hollywood, protecting the view­ ly on him. At times the fascist theme is fantastically ing public from the indecorous manifestations of the literal. In The Boys from Brazil and Marathon Man, old Imprimis (im·'pri-mas), taking its name from the Latin term for "in the first place," is the publication of Hillsdale College's Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Shavano Institute for National Leadership. Circulation 117,000 worldwide, established 1972. Complimentary subscriptions available. Nazis make a comeback. Both these films made mere­ jail: they're really in perfect accord with the whole culture flect that if a handful of German octogenerians holed up of evasion. in a South American hideout are really capable of tak­ Yet communism has murdered several times as many ing over the world, we ought to give them some credit: people as Nazism. It continues to extinguish every They really are the master race after all. freedom liberalism once stood for-freedom of religion, Hollywood imputes to fascism a kind of evil magic that of the press, of political criticism and opposition. o'erleaps the normal rules of causality and makes even Ironically, liberalism protests infringements of these isolated, superannuated Nazis a clear and present danger. freedoms only in anti-communist countries. In The Boys from Brazil, Joseph Mengele threatens the Thirty years ago, the philosopher Sidney Hook wrote world by cloning a number of kids from tissue saved that to be liberal is to be, almost by definition, anti­ from Der Fuehrer's body. The movie's profound grasp communist as well as anti-fascist. But today, the phrase of racial science can be inferred from the fact that each "liberal anti-communism" sounds less like a redundan­ and every one of these boys is an insufferable brat. cy than a contradiction in terms. To be anti-communist Movies like these have a profoundly consoling quali­ is to be immediately labeled a "right-winger." What we ty. Hollywood movies may seem to have gotten more now call liberalism is less like the old liberalism than like realistic than in the days of Irving Thalberg and Cecil B. the old fellow-traveling. Contemporary liberalism follows DeMille, but in a deeper sense they are really the same the contours of communism. If this were merely a mat­ as ever in catering to wishful thinking, in evading reali­ ter of hypocrisy in the liberal community, it might not ty, in confirming a sentimental worldview. They present be much of a problem. But I am afraid that it goes deeper sex obsessively, but without the complications of love, than that. It is now a problem in our culture: we live with jealousy, marriage, birth, loyalty, divorce, abandonment, our minds in concrete, and we don't even notice that we disease, and neurosis that attend it in serious literature are carrying contradictions in our souls. The infection of and drama. They represent politics without recognizing our language, our moral habits, our very thoughts, the largest political reality in the world today: com­ touches even conservative anti-communists. We take for munism. They finger the eternal enemy as a generic granted things that ought to startle and shame us. fascism, a force long since discredited and vanquished in Recently we celebrated our famous victory in Europe the real world. A real movie about communism would be with our old allies-the same Soviets who helped Hitler so unsettling that it probably wouldn't even find a launch the war with an invasion of Poland; the same distributor. Soviet Union that remains, after forty years, the proud Hollywood is rich in fantasies but impoverished in gen­ possessor of Poland. What on earth were we celebrating? uine ideals-ideals seriously related to moral standards. The defeat of Hitler. But by whom? And for what pur­ Eugene Methvin has recently written that the diaboliza­ pose? The diabolization of Hitler robs us of our critical tion of Hitler in the current culture is actually an evasion, faculties. It deprives us of the power to make the kind of an instance of what the psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan comparisons a healthy moral instinct would make almost called "selective inattention." It spares us the pain of fac­ automatically. ing a larger, blacker, and present evil. Hitler is safe. We Thus we react with shock if a lone eccentric wears a can all deplore him without risk. Hollywood's Fondas, swastika. We recognize it as an act of obscene perversi­ Brandos, and Coppolas can safely strike their moral ty even to associate oneself with a mere symbol of postures against fascism by adopting the current Party Nazism. Imagine how we'd feel if a new regime in Cen­ line and pretending that fascism'~ heirs are now in the tral America were to raise a flag with that hated insignia West. They know these bold gestures won't land them in and to make noises about racial purity and the interna­ tional Jewish money power. Would we listen seriously to About the Author the argument by some Americans that, after all, Nazism Joseph So bran earned his degree in English wasn't monolithic? That Hitler was only an aberration literature at Eastern Michigan University before whose excesses might be avoided in the future? That the going on to become one of the youngest editors at neo-Nazi regime represented the "legitimate aspirations" National Review in 1972. He is currently Senior of the people, or that it was an "indigenous force?" Editor at the magazine and is a regular contributor When an individual or a regime deliberately chooses to Human Life Review. His articles have appeared association with communist symbols, we are not equal­ in Harper's, the New York Times, Center Journal, ly shocked. We feel little, if any, horror at the implied The American Spectator, the National Catholic link with nearly seventy years of slavery, aggression, and Register, and Commonweal. He recently published megamurder, still in progress. We simply don't recognize Single Issues: Essays on the Crucial Social Ques­ communism as blasphemy against God and a brutal tions. He speaks frequently to college and public threat to all humanity. We are not scandalized by the audiences on a variety of topics and can be heard presence of large communist parties in Western democ­ weekly on the CBS radio program, Spectrum. racies, although we wouldn't tolerate large neo-Nazi par­ ties for a week. 2 Hitler remains a magnetic symbol of evil.
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